Elizabethan Catholics and the Mass

The Angelus - December 1982





In the concluding article of this series, Father Caraman brings out with the utmost clarity that it was for the Mass that Catholics under Elizabeth suffered and died. And they won—in this sense, that the Old Mass was never driven out of England by the persecution which she raised against it. Grateful acknowledgements to Christian Order.

WOMEN like Cecily Stonor and Margaret Clitherow were to be found all over the country. They came forward to offer their homes as shelters for priests; their houses, big and small, became the new churches and chapels of the old Faith; people flocked to them for Mass and the sacraments, for guidance and comfort as in former days they had gone to the great monasteries that were now untenanted and in ruins.

It was said that no Catholic was ever known to complain at the length of services.

However, there was no plan for the distribution of priests. Far too many made their way to London, for as the city was accustomed to strangers, they could survive longer there before attracting notice. But in the country it was different. Some shires had no priest at all to look after them. As each newly ordained man from the seminary came over, he fended for himself as best he could. In an age when local differences of speech marked a person as a foreigner in any but his own part of the country, priests who did not drift to London tended to make for their native district.


Henry Garnet & Catholic Centers

This was the situation in England when Henry Garnet stepped secretly ashore about a mile east of Folkestone in July 1586. He had no authority except what was freely accorded him by his fellow missionaries. With their assistance he set himself the task of establishing Catholic centers in all parts of the country that were still untended.

Plans were laid: and so systematically, that within ten years every county in England had a network of Catholic houses served by more than three hundred priests: and that in spite of continuing losses through death and imprisonment.

Usually there were two priests assigned to each house, one to serve the family and their friends, the other to go abroad in answer to calls of the sick and dying. In one Yorkshire center, described by the priest who served it, there lived three knights and their ladies, with their families and Catholic servants. In the order and regularity of the day it resembled a religious house of an earlier century. On Sundays and holy days the doors were unlocked and all came to Mass and heard a sermon; then later there was a catechism class for the children. On work days there were usually two Masses, the first, at six in the morning for the servants, and for all the gentlemen and for the ladies if they were not sick; the other was at eight, for those who had been absent from the first. In the afternoon at four o'clock there was evensong, and after that matins, attended by all the knights and their ladies, except when some extraordinary business prevented them. Most of the household also gave some time to meditation or mental prayer, and all at least every fourteen days confessed and communicated. After supper every night at nine o'clock, litanies were said together; and so immediately to bed.


A Catholic Cause Recovers

As houses like this became common throughout England the Catholic cause recovered. From the continent Allen addressed a message to the priests and people in England.

Owen was greatly admired for his discretion as well as his skill. He was never known to mention any house where he had been at work. Each place he built was different from the rest, so that, if one was discovered, it would give no clue to the construction of another. He began every new task by receiving Communion, and while he worked, he prayed. He was the man who might have brought death to more priests and ruin to more gentlemen than any other living Catholic. Indeed, had he betrayed his secrets, the damage to the Church would have been incalculable, for he knew the residences of almost every priest in England and the places where they were hidden, so that on a word from him all might have been taken like partridges in a net.

When eventually Nicholas was captured he was tortured to death. All the time of his agony he remained silent.

The year of the Spanish Armada, 1588, was perhaps the worst yet for English Catholics, for it gave the Queen the opportunity of branding them friends of the Spaniards. In the space of twelve months more than twenty-two priests were lost on the gallows, many more died in prison. Among the men and women of every station in society who were sentenced to death in the same year for the assistance they gave to priests, the most notable was Margaret Ward, a woman from Cheshire, who smuggled into a prison a rope by which a priest there called Watson made his escape.


It was the Mass that Mattered

In spite of the Queen's official assertions, it was manifest to all in every part of the realm that religion and in particular the Mass, was the true reason for these executions. Indeed Catholics, insofar as the law allowed them, were the first to come forward in defense of their country in her hour of danger.

Again, to keep up this pretense of their disloyalty, the Queen imprisoned all the principal Catholic laymen as men unsafe to be free at such a time. But again the people were unconvinced. On behalf of all these Catholics a knight from Rushton in Northamptonshire, Sir Thomas Tresham, pleaded with the Queen that, if the Spanish army should land on English soil, then he and his fellow Catholic prisoners should be privileged to stand, not in the rear of the line, but in the vanguard, and before the vanguard, "to witness to the world and leave record to all posterity of our religious loyalty and true English valour in defense of her Majesty's sacred person and the noble realm of England."

Still the official lies persisted. While priests on the scaffold, using the right of condemned criminals to address the crowd before execution, won the sympathy of all who stood by, the Council gave out that these men were the scum of the realm. Sir Robert Cecil called them creeping vermin.


Robert Southwell Brings Strength

It was Robert Southwell, who had landed in England with Garnet, that first came to their defense. He had been their teacher in Rome and now met and helped them on their arrival in London from the English College.

Southwell himself was the son of a courtier, Sir Richard Southwell, who had been brought up in childhood with Elizabeth. First he pointed out that the baseness of birth, which had been made a charge against his fellow priests, implied no offense against God or crime against the Queen. Then he showed that many of their number were the sons of knights or esquires or connected with the noble families of the realm; men who were heirs to large estates or fortunes and had renounced all to become priests. Among the few Catholic priests in England, just one-tenth the number of Protestant ministers, there were more gentlemen than among all the other clerics of the kingdom.

Birth was unimportant: it was the spirit and character of the students that mattered: and the training they received. Their regime was strict, their diet meagre, the conditions of their life austere: hundreds of English travelers abroad testified to this. Both at Rome and Douai the students attended lectures in religious controversy, which made them more than a match for the new ministers, who, sometimes had been sketchily educated. Many stories were told, even by Protestants, against their own pastors. For instance not far from Cambridge the Vicar of Trumpinton was the laughingstock of the University. On Palm Sunday when he was reading the gospel and came to the words, Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani (Lord, Lord, why hast Thou forsaken Me), he stopped and calling on the church wardens said, "This must be amended. Here is Eli twice in the book. I assure you that if my Lord of Ely (meaning the Bishop of the diocese) comes this way, he will have the book, for his name is in it. Therefore we shall scratch it out and put in our own town's name, so it shall read, Trumpinton, Trumpinton, lama sabacthani." And it was done!

This may have been a joke of the Cambridge graduates, but still there was no question that the priests were usually better trained. They were also taught to be severe on themselves while always showing great compassion towards the laity, especially those who had fallen from the faith for fear of ruin to their families.



Persecution in the North

About the time Allen wrote, there was a fresh outbreak of persecution in the North. In 1591 justices of the peace, constables and other officials were given unlimited power in a last desperate attempt to eliminate the Mass. A whole rabble army of priest hunters was raised and given authority to imprison Catholics of every class if they did not attend the Protestant services; they could even compel non-Catholic gentlemen to hand over their Catholic wives; lists of Catholics were made; if they did not comply, they also were imprisoned.

In all the villages and towns of Yorkshire and Durham Catholic gentlemen went abroad to other countries, while the poorer people left their homes and fled to the hills and moors. There they dug dwelling places for themselves in the earth or out of the rocks, and passed their days and nights in them until the searchers had passed. Others lived in ancient ruins, underground, with all their household; when it was possible they made separate beds, and partitioned off small rooms. For their fellow occupants they had toads, adders, frogs, lizards and such like creatures. As soon as word reached them that the searchers were in the neighborhood, a continual look-out, day and night, was kept against them. For five or six weeks at a time they lived in constant terror. If rain fell at night, it soon seeped through the dry sods that served for their roof and sometimes immersed them almost to the waist in water.


New Treason

This persecution was the result of a new royal proclamation, issued in October, 1591. Among other brutal measures against Catholics, it was now declared treason for a priest to receive any English man or woman into the Church, and also for any such person to be received.


Topcliffe, Priest-Hunter

But the Queen's new proclamation might never have been enforced had it not been for Richard Topcliffe, a priest-hunter, and a man of unsurpassed wickedness. Among Catholics his name was always mentioned with terror: "the most sordid of men," was the phrase they used to describe him.

This evil, ageing, grey-haired creature had his own private army of thugs recruited from the dregs of the people. The strength of his position with the Queen rested on the undertaking he gave her to drag from all the priests who fell into his hands a confession that they had plotted against her life; in other words, it was not for their priesthood, but for their treachery, that they were hounded to death. In return Topcliffe was given a free hand in the treatment of his victims. He boasted that whenever he sought an audience of the Queen, he was granted it.

In order to make good his promise more promptly, Topcliffe was given a license to practice his tortures privately in his own house, which adjoined the Gatehouse prison at the entrance to the old Abbey of Westminster.


Martyrs of the Mass

Among the first to suffer under him were four simple men, three of them priests and the fourth a school-master. They form a single company for they were all executed on the same day, 10 December 1591.

Swithun Wells was typical of many Englishmen of his time. Without any attachment to the new services, he had attended them in the belief that the day would certainly come when the Mass would once more be restored to its place. He had traveled abroad, was an accomplished linguist and musician; he entertained well, was good company and a fine sportsman. On his marriage he had set up a school at Monkton Farleigh near Bath in Somerset with permission from the Protestant bishop. But later he sacrificed everything to become a Catholic. He then rented a house at the upper end of Holborn for priests in London. His wife Alice and his daughter Margaret assisted him.

On the first Sunday in Advent, 1591, two priests arrived there to say their Matins together and afterwards to offer Mass.

Fr. Edmund Gennings had got no further than the Consecration when Topcliffe, with his assistants, broke into the house and through the door of the upper room where a small congregation of about ten Catholics was gathered. One of them, John Mason, seized hold of him, hurled him down the stairs and fell with him; the rest stood guarding the broken door. The second priest, Polydore Plasden (also called Oliver Palmer) came out. Topcliffe, who was nursing his broken head, threatened to raise the whole street, but fearing another toss, he agreed to Plasden's offer that the two priests should surrender themselves, if he would permit the Mass to be concluded without sacrilege.

Still wearing his vestments, Gennings was taken through the London streets, with all who had been present at his Mass. The chalice, missal and the altar furnishings were carried before him in mockery. Swithun Wells was out of his house at the time, but he was arrested on his return.

In prison, Swithun, who loved always to be with his friends, was confined alone.

With these men was tried Eustace White, a priest from Louth in Lincolnshire. He had been tortured almost to extremity by Topcliffe, and for forty-six days he slept only on a little straw, in his boots, his hands continually manacled. He came shivering to his trial in the tattered summer clothes he was wearing when he was taken. Topcliffe wanted to make him appear a miserable wraith. He had also thought of forcing Fr. Gennings to dress up in jester's clothes he had seized at Swithun's house.

On the Queen's instructions Swithun Wells, together with Fr. Gennings, was executed on a specially erected scaffold in Gray's Inn Fields, outside his own house; she thought thus to strike greater terror into Catholics.

Swithun was gay. As he was led to execution, he met an old hunting companion. "Farewell, old friend," he called happily to him, "Farewell, all hawking, hunting and old past-times. I go a better way."

Topcliffe assisted at their execution. Gennings spoke to the crowd.

When he was ripped open and his bowels cast into the fire, if credit can be given to the hundreds of people standing by, and to the hangman himself, he was heard to pray, "Sancte Gregori, ora pro me. At that moment the hangman had the priest's heart in his hand. He swore: "God's wounds. See his heart is in my hand, and yet Gregory is in his mouth. O egregious Papist!"

It was Pope St. Gregory who had sent Augustine to England, where he founded his see at Canterbury.


Martyrs not Traitors

The people of the North were taken in no more than Londoners by the propaganda against the priests. When, in the next year, 1592, John Boste was executed at Durham, more than three hundred ladies and women of the city walked with him in a solemn procession to the gallows. Asked where they were going, they answered, "to accompany that gentleman, that servant of God, to his death, as the Maries did Christ to Calvary." Hardly a man in the North believed that he was a traitor.

But the execution of no single priest did more to nail the slander against priests than did Robert Southwell's. He was now the best known and best loved priest in England. Non-Catholics acknowledged him as a poet, Catholics as a saint. He was Topcliffe's greatest prize: and, like Gennings and his companions, had been seized by this arch-fiend himself, who had gone out from London with a veritable army of followers to Uxenden Manor, near Harrow in Middlesex, where Southwell had been asked to say Mass and preach at a friend's house.

Betrayed by one of the household, Southwell came out of his hiding place to confront Topcliffe in the hall of the mansion. Slim, straightly-built, and with auburn eyes, he was still only thirty, but looked much younger. As they faced each other for the first time, Topcliffe shook with frenzy. He asked Southwell who he was. "A gentleman," Southwell answered. Topcliffe swore: "No, a priest, a traitor, a Jesuit." Then he rushed at him with his sword, but his men held him back.


Southwell's heroism under torture drew from Sir Robert Cecil, Sir William's son and successor, reluctant admiration. He had seen him at Topcliffe's mercy, silent and suffering. Riding out of London some time later with a friend, Cecil recalled the sight. "They boast," he told him, "about the heroes of antiquity, but we have a new torture which it is not possible for a man to endure. And yet I have seen Robert Southwell hanging by it, still as a tree-trunk, and none able to drag one word from his mouth."

A fellow priest described him as "a Goliath of fortitude."

Topcliffe was present at Southwell's trial. The priest's sufferings were now over, and he spoke only to save his companions from what he himself had endured. Upon his soul's salvation he declared that he had been tortured more than ten times by Topcliffe and that the memory of those tortures was worse than ten deaths. When Topcliffe challenged him to show the marks of his treatment, Southwell answered, "As a woman to show her throes."

Catholics watched Southwell as he walked back to prison, and noted that he carried himself with the composure of a monk. They remarked that this was an indication of saintliness in a man who had been separated from the sacraments for nearly two years.

Another priest, Henry Walpole, executed six weeks after Southwell, on 7 April 1595, had never said Mass on English soil. He was captured near Bridlington less than twenty-four hours after landing on the Yorkshire coast. Although he was taken to London for torture, he was returned to York for trial—Southwell's behavior on the scaffold at Tyburn had so convinced the crowd of the innocence of priests that the Queen did not dare have another executed in the capital till the memory of Southwell's death had faded.

At York Walpole pleaded that he did not fall under the law that made priests traitors, since it concerned only those that did not give themselves up within forty-eight hours of landing. Walpole argued that when he was arrested his time had not run out. Nevertheless he was executed.


Philip Howard

A fellow-prisoner of both Walpole and Southwell in the Tower had been Philip Howard, the leading nobleman in England. As an infant he had been baptized by Nicholas Heath, the Archbishop of York in the royal chapel at Whitehall, a little over two years before the death of Queen Mary. His father was Thomas, the fourth Duke of Norfolk, the only Duke in England; his godfather, Philip, Mary's husband, after whom he was christened. As a young man he had been the favorite at court, witty, handsome, gay and cultivated. His life was given entirely to pleasure-seeking: Anne Dacres, whom he married, suffered his vagaries with patience.

In 1585, when he was twenty-seven years old, Philip broke from his former life and was received into the Church, an act of treason punishable by death. He determined now to go abroad, where he could attend Mass and lead a full Catholic life without restriction or penalty. His plan, however, was betrayed. He had hardly embarked than his ship was boarded by the Queen's men and he was brought back a prisoner to the Tower.

There he remained. The Queen who thought she knew him well, believed he would weaken and reform, but she did not take account of the grace he had been given. Philip was no longer the impulsive, petulant youth, the fickle darling of her court, but a man moulded by God, and set by grace to endure a long imprisonment, even suffer death, for his Faith. Most of his days he passed in prayer. His only help came from letters written to him by Robert Southwell, who later, for the benefit of other Catholic prisoners, published them in a book which he entitled An Epistle of Comfort.

After some two years in prison Philip, by bribing his gaoler, got access to the cell of a priest, Father William Bennet. A chalice, some wine and vestments were smuggled in, and there, on Sundays and feast days, a little congregation gathered for Mass. Philip usually served.

Although he was tried and condemned to death, the sentence was never carried out. The Queen was afraid, for it was obvious to the whole of England that Philip was not a traitor. Indeed, after sentence had been passed and he was let out of Westminster Hall with the blade of the executioner's axe turned inwards toward his face (an indication at the trial of nobles that the prisoner had been found guilty) there arose suddenly from the waiting crowd such a great cry of horror that it could be heard for a great distance both up and down the river.

Philip lived on in his cell, with his dog and faithful servant. Slowly he was dying. The end came on 19 October, just eight months after Southwell's execution. When he could no longer read, he spent his time saying his beads or reciting psalms and prayers he knew from memory. The priest who had reconciled him to the Church spoke of him after his death as a peer of two realms, of earth and of heaven.


Thomas Colton

Another prisoner, very different in age and origin, but similar to Philip in resolution, who suffered cruelly for the Faith was Thomas Colton, a poor lad who had been a servant to the priests confined in Wisbech Castle. He was in prison in Bridewell while Philip lay dying in the Tower. Thomas had been caught at Rye, in Hampshire, while trying to cross the sea to a seminary abroad. Brought before the Archbishop of Canterbury and his commissioners at Lambeth, he was asked to give reasons why he would not go to church. He answered,

In Bridewell the boy was brutally handled. For nine weeks he was chained to a block, and for another five he stood with both his hands stretched above his head against a wall in the standing stocks.

Even before his conversion, Philip Howard had written in rebuke to a friend for treating a beggar with discourtesy. "Verily, you have too much forgot yourself, good Sir, in abusing such a poor man. Before God there is no difference between poor and rich, betwixt beggar and the gentleman. We are all of the same nature, made of the same mould. Those who are of better birth or higher degree ought not to condemn others, much less insult them, but rather help them."


John Rigby

John Rigby was not a beggar or of low degree, but his occupation was humble. A Lancashire man from near Wigan, he became the steward of a Catholic family at Sawston Hal, where Nicholas Owen had made two hiding places. Appearing one day in a suit touching his master's business, he confessed that he had been reconciled to the Church, and to his surprise was condemned to death for this account. He was young, sturdily built, unmarried, about thirty years of age. As he stood waiting execution at the foot of the ladder, at St. Thomas Waterings in Southwark, he prayed aloud until, in reciting the Creed, he came to the phrase, "the holy Apostles St. Peter and Paul." When the people heard this, they protested that he was praying to saints and he was not permitted to continue. He was cut down so short a time after the cart was drawn away, that he stood again upright on his feet, and in full possession of his senses was dragged by the executioners to the quartering block. "God forgive you," he said aloud and distinctly, "Jesus, receive my soul." When he felt them pulling his heart out, he was still so strong that instinctively he thrust the fellows from him. Finally they cut off his head and divided his quarters, pinning them in several places about the city to the south of the Thames.


Popham Replaces Topcliffe

Shortly after Rigby's death on 21 June 1600, Topcliffe fell from favor with the Queen. Desperately as he had tried, he had failed to make good his undertaking to her that he would prove Catholics to be traitors. People thought that some mercy would be shown to Catholics now that Topcliffe was gone and the Queen herself could not be far from her closing days, but the contrary happened. As the weeks drew on, her fear of assassination increased; and now, in Topcliffe's place, there was the Chief Justice, Sir John Popham, who was held in detestation by both Catholics and the country at large.


Anne Line

Among the first to suffer at his hands was a lady from Essex, Anne Line, who kept three adjoining houses in London. In the first she looked after a number of small children and instructed them in the Faith; in the second, she had a resident chaplain; the third and largest she used as a hostel for priests.

Her health was poor; she lived in great poverty, frequently she suffered exhaustion; but she worked ceaselessly, and her time not given to housekeeping she devoted to making vestments.

On Candlemas Day, 1601, she was arrested in her own house. Although she was sick, Popham insisted that she should be carried in her invalid chair to her trial. On the scaffold she told the people:

Anne Line was one of the last martyrs of the reign.


Mass Still Said in England

The priests, and the men and women who sacrificed their lives for them, had fought a long and unrelenting fight. But the Mass was still said in England. Moreover, in all parts of the country there were many families who were ready to become Catholic if no penalties were imposed, and still more would have done the same, if the priests had been permitted to preach openly: very few indeed were satisfied with the new religion that had replaced the old. From his own experience one priest reported that if it had been only possible to approach the dying, there was, even now, scarcely a man in England would not die a Catholic; and he added,



Bitter Last Years

There was still a great multitude of Catholics in her realm. She looked ahead to her end with little composure, though in public she forced herself to be merry. In order to conceal the decay in her face, she stuffed fine cloths into her mouth to puff out her cheeks.

Sometimes, when walking out in winter, she would pull off her petticoat, as if to show she was too hot, while the ladies waiting on her were shivering with cold.

When she was still in moderate health, her chamberlain, Sir John Stanhope, presented her with a piece of gold the size of an angel, a current English coin, and told her that, by wearing it round her neck, an old lady in Wales had lived to a hundred and twenty years.

The Queen took it and placed it about her person: yet, though she did not fall suddenly sick, she slowly lost strength. For many days none of her Councillors could persuade her to take to her bed: indeed, during three nights she sat on her stool, fully dressed, refusing both to eat and drink. She would answer no questions and take no medicine. Once only she spoke softly to the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard, saying that if he knew what she had seen in her bed, he would not seek to persuade her as he did. She shook her head and with a pitiful voice, complained, "I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck." Howard reminded her of the courage she had always shown at times of crisis. The Queen replied: "I am tied and the case is altered with me."

Eventually after a further fifteen days, the Council sent to her the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other Bishops. This offended her. She angrily rated them and ordered them away, asserting that she knew full well that they were hedge-priests (a phrase of contempt both for their office and origin), and took it for an indignity that they should speak to her.


The Queen is Dead

During those days that she lay dying beyond hope of recovery, a strange silence descended on the city, as if it were under interdict and divine worship suspended. "Not a bell rung out," noted a priest imprisoned in the Tower.

"Not a bugle sounded—though ordinarily they were often heard."

About midnight on the 24th of March, the vigil of the Annunciation, she died. The next day, between eight and nine o'clock, the new King, James of Scotland, was proclaimed in the main streets of London. Once again bonfires were in the streets, and there were banquets and feasting.